What is life if not a learning experience?

After spending generally a lifetime in this world of ours, the years varying from sixty to eighty on an average according to popular human statistics, not many people actually find the time or relevance to ask the all important question, “What then, is the definition of Life?” For most of them, it is just a passing in time from one situation to another, from one problem to the next and slowly, without even realizing the fact that their days are numbered, the purpose or objective of life is totally lost on them. Eventuality is the most common excuse for this oversight and in most cases fatality is blamed upon to cover for their lack of inquisitiveness. Now this wouldn’t have been much of a problem if our intelligence had remained at the animal level of evolution, but at our level of thought and reason we just cannot afford to lose out on the chance to experience and understand the key aspects of living and the inherent truth of our existence, or simply put – Enlightenment!

If I were to list out the various difficult situations and problems faced in life, there would be no end to them and there is not much of a difference between the specifics found in mine, to those making up the lives of others. Right from youth till the age when adolescence disappears into the formative perambulations of maturity, there is no dearth of opportunities to study the schema of life; however, it is the prejudiced proclamations of other’s experiences that limited my earnest process of understanding and forming a thesis of my own experiences. According the famous essay by Immanuel Kant, “Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! [dare to know] "Have courage to use your own understanding!" - that is the motto of enlightenment.” (What is Enlightenment?,1784). ‘As long as one makes no mistakes, one never learns to succeed and this is the very verse of life to be kept in mind by anyone entering the arena of life’s battles.

It is all very easy to state the need for reason and understanding to deal with troubles, but the difficulty lies in the fact that we forget the basis of all human error and folly in judgment, which is emotional dependency. As long as the fundamental decisions at the various turns in our journey of enlightenment, which is exactly what life is, are made on the rationale of feelings, then we would discover the inevitability of one tight situation leading into another and problems mutating into ones of greater complexities. The concept of learning the underlying lessons that this journey is trying to teach us escapes us completely, naturally due to the blinding effects of emotions. If we can disentangle ourselves from the emotional cobwebs and look at every situation from the perspective of an outsider or an unbiased observer to the story of our lives, then the instrument of control lies firmly within our hands, or specifically our mind. Friedrich Nietzsche once remarked that “one ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.” (Krieger 55) After a decade of societal incarceration and then some more juvenile years of emotional phantasmagoria, when the fire of passion guides the intellect into jeopardizing situations, experimenting into the wilder phases of life mainly under the influence of peer pressure and insistent disregard for the voices of parental authority, the show of independence must be made. Parental authority is probably the most popularly despised counsel throughout the adolescent species, the impudence of which in most cases leads to dire consequences and yet lasting entire lifetimes as seen in the memoirs of Robinson Crusoe, “As I had once done thus in my breaking away from my parents, so I could not be content now, but I must go and leave the happy view I had of being a rich and thriving man in my new plantation, only to pursue a rash and immoderate desire of rising faster than the Nature of the Thing admitted; and thus I cast my self down again into the deepest gulf of human misery that ever man fell into, or perhaps could be consistent with life and a state of health in the world.” (Defoe 29)

Several instances of wrong turns in my journey of enlightenment could be stated as examples of this blatant show of independence. However the most interesting of these and probably a characteristic of the cross section of the population sharing the same instincts and intuition as mine, and most generally found in every age and civilization till date, is the problem of addiction. In today’s world, addiction has become a composite part of the lifestyle, and as long as we are living in a dimension of consumerism and total materialism with regards to ethics and morality, this complement to our very nature is and will remain our one way ticket to extinction. Addiction can take the form of several different objective or usage criteria, and though in my case it started with psychedelic drugs, in most other cases it can range from eating, shopping, alcoholism, sadism and sometimes something as unobtrusive as the common nagging of the spouse in a marital relationship. And the degree of addiction varies too, depending on the Kantian maturity level and to an extent the ontological awareness of the subject. Whatever is the object of addiction, what most people forget and what I had the good fortune to discover is that everything in life, including the addiction is based on a simple system of decisions.

One paragraph, a few words and maybe a mighty revelation from the very controversial pseudo-memoir A Million Little Pieces towards the end of my sojourn, is probably what brought me to my senses: “Addiction is a decision. An individual wants something, whatever that something is, and makes a decision to get it. Once they have it, they make a decision to take it. If they take it too often, that process of decision making gets out of control, and if it gets far out of control, it becomes an addiction. At that point the decision is a difficult one to make, but it is still a decision. Do I or don't I. Am I going to take or am I not going to waste my life or am I going to say no and try and stay sober and be a decent Person. It is a decision. Each and every time. A decision. String enough of those decisions together and you set a course and you set a standard of living. Addict or human. Genetics do not make that call. They are just an excuse. They allow people to say it wasn't my fault I am genetically predisposed. It wasn't my fault I was programmed from day one. It wasn't my fault I didn't have any say in the matter. Bullshit. Fuck that bullshit. There is always a decision. Take responsibility for it. Addict or human. It's a fucking decision. Each and every time.” (Frey 291). Yet the decision for me did not come instantaneously, because whatever lessons had to be learnt from this situation were not completely understood.

There is a reason why Kant insisted that maturity is when one understands the implied lesson in any given situation, without acting upon the guidance of another. Regardless of the consequences arising from the unguided action, be it success or failure, the ownership lies with the doer and this makes all the difference in the process of education or growing up. Even though I had several downfalls and habitual corrections along the way, I have complete ownership on all of these and the lessons learnt are immensely valuable, when I observe from where I stand today. With respect to addictions, what people need is awareness and not prohibitive support, and maybe the people around them need to respect and understand the value of each and every individual’s decision, that goes towards shaping lives. Decisions are meant to be induced and not influenced by personal biases.

Even though the decision was finally made, I guess the lesson I learnt from my tryst with psychedelics was to protect my freedom of thought and respect every situation in life as an opportunity to understand better my place in this world. That being said, life is no easy roller-coaster ride for most people and maybe this is so because each and everyone’s path to enlightenment is different and bizarre in their own respective ways; coping with difficulties along the way depends on the structural constitution of the mind, which is repeatedly and consistently altered by a wonderful auto-feedback mechanism built into our cognitive system, that responds to the consequences arising out of every situation. It is quite clear that nature has endowed us with every possible means to constantly analyze, improvise and incorporate changes, by which we may enter into the next phase of evolution, that of consciousness.

Life is only a continuous form of education, and as the famous poet Tagore rightly said, “The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence.” (Personality 116). So if the question arises as to how I dealt with any particular situation in life, or for that matter all of them put together till now and all that may arise in the future, my answer would be: ‘to keep myself aware of the fact that every situation is only a process of self-evaluation and an event in itself, by which realization occurs that I am not an isolated island, but an indivisible part of a singular body that goes by the name of humanity.’